The Double

by Ann Gosslin

‘What is that smell?’ Vidor pressed a napkin to his nose.

  ‘Almonds and cinnamon, from the biscuits, I believe. Why, does it bother you?’

  ‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s just that I’m not particularly fond of almonds. Poppy seed cake was what my mother used to make on Sundays. An old family recipe and a favourite of mine.’

  Gessen raised his eyebrows, as if waiting for Vidor to expand on this particular memory. But Vidor had been feeling odd all day and was in no mood to oblige.

  ‘My friends and I got to talking about our days at the Sorbonne as foreign students and how excited we were to be in Paris,’ Gessen was saying as he nudged the plate of almond biscuits across the table. ‘Somebody asked me if I remembered this one particular boy. Very shy, he was. From somewhere in the Balkans, I believe. Or perhaps the Middle East.’

  Vidor gave him a blank look.

  ‘He was a philosophy student, and we had some classes together. Did I tell you I began my studies in philosophy before switching to medicine? At that age, I believed it was the great thinkers who had solved the problem of living in the world. Of course, I was wrong. My classmate had a change of heart, as well, apparently. When I inquired about him, I was told he’d left the university. I never thought anything about it, not for years. But after talking with my old school friends, I began to wonder what happened to him.’

  During this rambling monologue Vidor experienced an odd sensation at the back of his skull. He shifted in the chair to look at the snow spinning from the sky. In the overheated room, the smell of almonds was nauseating. Sweat trickled down the side of his face, but when he thought about wiping it away, he couldn’t move his arms. If he could just close his eyes for a minute… but when he did, the falling snow outside the window was replaced by the heat of a merciless sun, beating down from a copper sky.

  As he scuffed along a narrow street, his leather sandals kicked up clouds of dust. In the distance, a slash of blue water gleamed on the horizon. His throat burned with thirst and he sought in vain a sliver of shade to rest in. As a plaintive call wafted through the air, shopkeepers covered their wares, and women hurried home through the streets, their straw bags filled with onions and mint, and raw meat wrapped in paper.

  ‘Where are you now?’

  The voice drifted towards him across a desert of space and time. The dusty street wavered and faded away. The blue water vanished. A man strode down the street. His black hair slicked back, his jaw clenched in anger. He ran after the man, but he was too weak to catch him. Abi, entadr. Hadha ana. Father, wait. It’s me. Without bothering to glance back, the man ducked into an alley and disappeared.

  ‘Vidor? It’s all right. You’re safe here.’

  The sun scorched his face, the stones burned his feet. He had forgotten to buy the onions and olive oil the old woman needed, and now the market was closed. Tears ran down his face.

  ‘Vidor?’

  He opened his eyes, rubbed the side of his head. Where was he? Ah yes, the clinic. The snow falling fast. And seated across from him, his nemesis Gessen, whose eyes bored into his very soul.

  ‘I must have dozed off for a moment,’ Vidor said. He brushed the crumbs from his lap. Had he eaten one of the biscuits? Perhaps they were laced with some kind of hallucinogen. He wouldn’t put it past Gessen. Anything to trip him up. He rubbed his eyes. ‘I haven’t been sleeping well lately.’

  ‘You seemed to have entered into a trance. Can you tell me what you saw?’

  His head, heavy as a stone, threatened to pull him into the depths. ‘Nothing. I saw nothing. But the heat… it was making me tired.’

  ‘The heat?’

  He frowned at the snow outside. ‘Could we open the window? It’s very warm in here.’ When he looked at his hands, he did not recognise them. ‘What day is it today, Wednesday, Friday?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes,’ Vidor said, shaking off his torpor. ‘I need to know what day it is. The exact date and time. I can’t…’ His head spun, and he closed his eyes, hearing for a moment what sounded like billiard balls smacking together.

  ‘It’s Friday, 19 December.’

  ‘And the time?’ It was an effort to get the words out. ‘I need to know the exact time.’

  Gessen showed him his watch. ‘In a few seconds it will be exactly 2.53 pm.’

  Two fifty-three. That was the time? Two fifty-three. The laugh that burst from his throat came out like a bark. At last, he understood the absurdity of it. Man’s ridiculous attempt to corral the movement of the sun inside the cogs of a wristwatch. Laughter bubbled up through his chest. Two fifty-three. What did it even mean in the unfathomable eternity of time? The puny lives of men. Brutish and short, indeed.

  He absently flicked his ear. Gessen’s eyes, keen as a ferret’s, were riveted on Vidor’s face. What was he looking at? Impossible to breathe with the air sucked out of the room, and he yanked at the collar of his shirt. His body quivered, and he gasped as he was swept – blessed relief – into the arms of darkness.

  44

  The only thing Vidor wanted was to be alone. But how to achieve a moment of solitude in this glorified hamster cage, where his every move was tracked and recorded? His own room should have been a refuge, but it was the first place someone might look. He would have to find a private nook to hide away in. Earlier, he’d taken breakfast in his room, desperate to avoid the clank of cutlery and furtive looks from the others. But he couldn’t stay shut up here all day.

  He crossed the room to look out at the gloomy sky and the grounds blanketed in snow. No one was about, but the skin on the back of his neck prickled as if someone was standing behind him. He spun around, but the room was empty.

  All night he’d tossed and turned, plagued by strange dreams. From a narrow alley, a man with sun-bronzed skin and the yellow eyes of a raptor beckoned to him. The alley would provide a welcome shelter from the burning sun, but the man frightened him. Even within the chaotic flicker of his dreams he knew not to follow, that if he got too close, the man would yank him into the shadows and slit his throat.

  When he woke, struggling for breath, he’d flung himself off the bed, tearing at his clothing, gasping for air, only to discover that during the night, someone had entered his room. Whoever it was had taken the polished stones from the brass tray on the dressing table and arranged them in neat rows of four by three, in the approximate order of the visual spectrum, beginning with the dark red jasper and ending with the amethyst, glowing violet in the morning light. The sandpiper painting was slightly askew. He’d counted the birds. Only nine. Where was the tenth? Where was the bloody tenth bird? He counted again, but the elusive creature had taken flight.

  He squeezed his eyes shut. This infuriating nuthouse was driving him mad. Remaining closed up in his room all day felt impossible now. How could he? Not when he felt a presence near him and heard the whoosh of someone else’s exhaled breath. Outside, the snow was piled up to the windows. What a fate to be buried here alive.

  Escape was the only answer. But where? The pool and sauna would be crowded on a day like today, with everyone seeking the warmth and comfort of the pseudo-tropical heat. Saturday. He was sure of it. A minor triumph to know the day of the week. Something to cling to, a shred of sanity. With no sessions taking place in the Movement & Meditation hall, it was the perfect place to hide.

  He pulled on his parka and hurried down the path, already cleared of last night’s snowfall. Before entering the pavilion, he glanced back to check that no one had followed him. The meditation room was dark and smelled faintly of oranges. He hesitated before pressing the switch by the door. The fairy lights in the ceiling sprang on and winked at him like stars. From the stack by the wall, he took one of the cushiony mats, stuffed with dried grasses, and stretched out in the middle of the floor. If he squinted, he could pretend he was gazing up at the night sky in summer and breathing in the rarefied air of the high desert.

  Vidor had never been to the desert, but as the darkness envelope
d him like a warm cloak, he smelled the bitter tang of almonds and his body seemed to dissolve as it teleported to another land. A place with a burning sun and scorching sands swirling in the wind, scouring his skin and stinging his eyes. An excellent place to be alone, he imagined. Wrapped in a coarse wool blanket with only his eyes exposed, he would stare for hours at the shards of light above his head, scattered across the heavens, like bits of broken glass.

  As his breathing slowed and the remnants of his dreams evaporated, it occurred to him that he could be his own healer. He didn’t need Dr Gessen. In this moment, his mind was as clear as blown glass. He could go home now. That man in Copenhagen was perfectly fine. He’d barely touched him. The darkness pulled him in and from the void a woman’s voice called to him. Ana huna. I am here. Go to sleep.

  He held out his hand to touch her face. Breathe in, breathe out. It took him a moment to realise he had acquired an echo. With each breath, a second followed close behind. Someone – or something – was in the room with him. He tensed. It wasn’t the woman urging him to sleep. She had fled. Could it be that the golem haunting his dreams had followed him here? But he wasn’t dreaming, and he waggled his toes to be sure.

  ‘Who’s there?’ His voice came out like a squeak, insignificant in the vacuum of space.

  A whisper of fabric, a faint cough.

  ‘I must have dozed off.’

  An English voice. He blinked at the darkness as a form took shape on the other side of the room. ‘Libby?’

  ‘I’m over here.’

  ‘Shall I switch on the light?’

  ‘No, I like it this way. I’ll come closer to you.’

  A shadow fell across him as Libby placed her mat next to his and lay down on her back. ‘I came here right after breakfast. It’s like being in a cave, isn’t it?’

  The grass-filled mat rustled as she turned on her side to face him, so close her breath, smelling faintly of lemon drops, grazed his skin. Mixed with the meadow-sweet scent of dried grass, he had the odd sensation that he’d fallen through a hole in the earth and come out on the other side, in a land where summer reigned.

  Her voice, when she spoke, was barely a whisper. ‘I heard you went to the village the other day.’

  He cringed. Was nothing confidential? It was too dark to see her face, but he could sense her brow was creased with concern. A point of light shone from her pupils, like a small woodland creature peeking from its burrow. In the tomb-like atmosphere, it was easy to picture what it would feel like to be dead, and for once the thought didn’t frighten him. His spirit freed at last, while the atoms from his corporeal body returned to the earth from whence they came. How calm it felt to consider death in this place, with this girl beside him, when all his life he’d had a fear of dark places and a terror of dying. Damp grottos and train tunnels. Locked cupboards, prison cells deep underground.

  Warm fingers grazed the back of his hand. ‘You’re shaking.’

  He gasped as his mind returned to his body. ‘No, I’m fine.’

  She pulled her hand away.

  ‘No, don’t. It’s… ’ His cheeks flamed hot. ‘It’s nice to know that someone else understands.’

  ‘Understands what?’

  He sucked in his breath. ‘The pain of living. The death of desire.’

  For a moment she was silent. ‘It doesn’t have to be painful.’

  He could just make out the ghostly outline of her profile, the smooth plane of her forehead and upturned nose. He took comfort in the idea that her whole life stretched before her like a field of wheat, shimmering in the sun. So, how could he possibly tell her that the sun-kissed grain transformed, at some point, into a minefield? You woke up one day to find that everything you loved was gone. He coughed and closed his eyes. ‘I wanted to tell you before, but I didn’t know how,’ he said, crossing his hands over his chest. ‘I think Ismail is alive.’

  She gasped and bolted upright. ‘Why would you say that?’

  ‘I’ve seen him. Twice. The second time was just the other day, not long after the sun went down. He was lurking in a corner of the Zen garden and didn’t see me. But he must have heard me coming for as I drew closer, he slipped away. I thought of calling out his name but… it seemed wrong to disturb him.’

  Her voice was ragged with grief. ‘It was a hallucination. Or one of your optical illusions.’ She stifled a sob. ‘I know he’s dead. Dr Gessen told me he identified the body himself.’

  ‘He could be lying.’

  ‘And why would he do that?’

  Her anger was like a slap in the face. It might be best to keep quiet about any further sightings. Something was going on, though, he was sure of it. Part of Gessen’s plot to drive him to the brink of insanity.

  She turned her head. In the dim light he had a vision of the older woman she would one day become. Accomplished, fiercely intelligent. Yet ever a free spirit, skimming lightly over the earth.

  ‘You asked me earlier how I ended up here. If you still want to know, it’s because I suffered some kind of amnesia after my friend died. She fell out the window at a student pub in Oxford. I’d begged her to go out that night, even though she wanted to stay in. If only she’d told me to piss off.’ Libby sat up and hugged her knees. ‘Three weeks later, when the police found me living in Bristol under an assumed name, I was admitted to the psych ward at a local hospital. After a couple of days, I finally remembered who I was, but I had no memory of travelling to Bristol, or the three weeks I’d spent there as a girl named Margaret. Turns out, I’d had something called a fugue state.’ She tried to catch his eye. ‘Even though I felt fine, my dad wanted me to come here to be treated by Dr Gessen. Apparently, that’s one of his specialities.’

  ‘Fugue states?’

  ‘Anything to do with amnesia, I think.’

  His heart thumped oddly. ‘Funny how the brain works… Sometimes, I…’ He hesitated, trying to formulate his thoughts. ‘I’ve felt at times this strange sensation, that someone – or something – but not exactly me, had taken up residence in my body.’ He smiled to let her in on the joke. ‘Now you’ll think I’m truly mad.’

  When she said nothing, Vidor lay back and focused on the fairy lights, which once again had transformed into a sprinkling of stars in the vast reaches of space. In a gesture of solidarity, he reached out and briefly touched her wrist, grateful that she didn’t flinch and pull away.

  45

  The chessboard was set up on the table by the hearth. Next to it, Gessen placed a tray with tea and a plate of those almond biscuits with the strange ability to transport Vidor to a different place and time. The scene was set. The only thing missing was the patient himself. Gessen turned to the window where the snow-covered mountains resembled great dollops of meringue. The glare was blinding, and he hastened to adjust the window shades.

  In moments like these, waiting for his patient to arrive, he often grew dizzy at the monumental task ahead of him, and the complexity of the journey that had brought him here.

  But here he was, driven by his compulsive need to help the suffering. After digging into the details of Vidor’s past life in Paris, and compiling a meagre dossier on Malik Sayid, he hovered on the cusp of a hypothesis for Vidor’s trouble. But even after viewing Madame Chabon’s photographs of her brother, Vidor, the last taken when he was seventeen, it was difficult to say whether his patient, the grown-up Vidor Kiraly, was the same boy. The colour of the eyes matched, as did the slope of his forehead, but who at fifty-eight resembled their teenaged selves?

  Somewhere along the wavy line stretching into the past, Malik Sayid must have played a part in Vidor’s story. Had they been friends – or something more? A love sought and spurned. Perhaps Malik died in an accident and Vidor, in his guilt or anguish, had absorbed some of his friend’s mannerisms. Gessen felt he was tantalisingly close to discovering the connection, but only Vidor could provide the final piece to the puzzle.

  As if on cue, Vidor shuffled into the room, whey-faced and hesitant in his
movements. Gone was the debonair strut and sheen of cultivated irony. Was he ill? Perhaps, in this more vulnerable state, like a newly hatched moth, Vidor would soften and reveal his true self.

  ‘Please have a seat by the fire,’ Gessen said. ‘It will distract us from the weather.’ With the speed of a freight train, a bank of clouds had rolled across the valley and the snow was coming down fast.

  As soon as Vidor was settled, Gessen poured out the tea. ‘If you don’t mind my saying, you’re looking rather worn out. Not sleeping well?’

  Vidor’s eyes swam as he attempted to focus on Gessen’s face. ‘Something keeps waking me at night, and I end up staring at the ceiling. Often till dawn.’

  ‘Is something troubling you?’ Gessen studied Vidor over the rim of his teacup.

  A shake of the head.

  ‘Strange dreams, perhaps?’

  Vidor shifted in his seat. ‘If I have dreams, I don’t remember them.’

  Gessen handed across the plate of almond biscuits, but Vidor grimaced and pushed them away. Like the last time, either the sight or smell of the biscuits seemed to sicken him. Almost as if Gessen had handed him a plate of uncooked snails. To give Vidor a chance to compose himself, he rose and closed the curtains, blocking out the elements. He dunked one of the almond biscuits into his tea and took a bite. Delicious. His chef had recreated a recipe he’d found in a cookbook on North African cuisine.

  ‘In my second year of medical school,’ Gessen said, as he topped up their glasses of peppermint tea, ‘an interesting case, quite rare, was admitted to the Salpêtrière hospital. I didn’t meet the patient myself, but his malady was described in detail during one of our lectures. The boy, just shy of his eighteenth birthday, had been suffering from stomach pains, and presented with a distended abdomen and significant weight loss. A CAT scan showed a mass growing in the boy’s abdomen, just under the liver. His doctors thought it was a tumour, at first, but when they opened him up to remove it, they were shocked to discover that it was no ordinary tumour. The lump of tissue contained a spine and a rudimentary brain. Even vestigial fingers and eyes.’ He studied Vidor’s face for signs of squeamishness. But he didn’t look uncomfortable, merely bored, as if counting the minutes until he could return to his room.